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Salvadore Poe was a successful musician from New York, making records, touring, having videos on MTV and doing film scores, when in 1997 he had a life changing experience that propelled him on a single-pointed inquiry in search of enlightenment. During the next seven years he immersed himself in intensive retreats in USA, Europe and India, met many teachers, including U.G. Krishnamurti, Douglas Harding, Toni Packer, among others, and eventually moved to India where he lived for two years in the ashram of Ajja, a recognized spiritual master, and then for a year in the ashram of another spiritual master, Siva Sakthi Ammaiyar. During all these years he meditated countless hours, had numerous mystical, transcendent experiences and then finally, frustrated with it all, met his last teacher, Dolano in 2004, and his search was over. Eight years later, living an ordinary life making music in India, someone he met asked him to work one on one with a spiritual seeker.

Since then Salvadore has been offering a means of inquiry intended to let you come to know for yourself that you are now and always have been complete, whole, lacking nothing and free. This recognition, when true and doubtless, ends seeking automatically, as it is seen that what you have been seeking is already true and realized. What has kept you from this ‘knowing’ are all of the myriad ideas, beliefs and spiritual concepts given to you by culture and religion, which you have taken for granted without really investigating. But once clearly investigated they all fall, leaving you at ease here and now with and as what is. Seeking is finished, there is no cause of it any longer. Life is lived at ease.

Salvadore currently divides his time between India and New York State, writing and recording music and sharing the inquiries.

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Oneness Meditation Center: http://on.fb.me/VGjX0G ♥ My Website: http://ajfortuna.com ♥ Being Spiritually Awake: http://on.fb.me/1dKt09f ♥ Alan Wilson Watts (6 January 1915 – 16 November 1973) was a British-born American philosopher, writer, and speaker, best known as an interpreter and populariser of Eastern philosophy for a Western audience. Born in Chislehurst, England, he moved to the United States in 1938 and began Zen training in New York. Pursuing a career, he attended Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, where he received a master’s degree in theology. Watts became an Episcopal priest in 1945, then left the ministry in 1950 and moved to California, where he joined the faculty of the American Academy of Asian Studies.

Watts gained a large following in the San Francisco Bay Area while working as a volunteer programmer at KPFA, a Pacifica Radio station in Berkeley. Watts wrote more than 25 books and articles on subjects important to Eastern and Western religion, introducing the then-burgeoning youth culture to The Way of Zen (1957), one of the first bestselling books on Buddhism. In Psychotherapy East and West (1961), Watts proposed that Buddhism could be thought of as a form of psychotherapy and not a religion. He considered “Nature, Man, and Woman” (1958) to be, “from a literary point of view – the best book I have ever written.”[citation needed] He also explored human consciousness, in the essay “The New Alchemy” (1958), and in the book The Joyous Cosmology (1962).

Towards the end of his life, he divided his time between a houseboat in Sausalito and a cabin on Mount Tamalpais. Many of his books are now available in digital format and many of his recorded talks and lectures are available on the Internet. According to the critic Erik Davis, his “writings and recorded talks still shimmer with a profound and galvanizing lucidity.

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By James Baraz, co-founding teacher of Spirit Rock Meditation Center and co-author of Awakening Joy

In our competitive culture, we usually think “more is better”. Being Number One, winning at all costs, and “having the most” is deeply ingrained in our psyche as real success. This model of going for the max is often erroneously applied to our own understanding of happiness. People mistakenly think intense delight is a sign that their attempt at true well-being is really successful.

However, when we look for bells and whistles as indications of true happiness, we’re misunderstanding a very important principle: Setting a high bar of intense happiness works against true well-being. Although it’s fine to enjoy peak experiences when they arise, measuring that ideal against a moderate level of “okayness” can easily render this moment as “not good enough”.

One of my favorite Calvin and Hobbes cartoons starts off with a smiling Calvin saying, “Here I am happy and content.” In the next frame, he further reflects: “But not euphoric.” Third frame: “So I’m no longer content. My day is completely ruined.” Last frame: “I should have stopped thinking while I was ahead.”

When people do my online Awakening Joy course, they often come with ideas of what joy is supposed to look like. A complaint I sometimes hear is, “I’m trying really hard to be joyful and it’s not working.” That kind of efforting to be joyful only leads to frustration! Instead, I recommend that one simply begin noticing moments of feeling “okay”. If you tend to have a life filled with intense drama, I often suggest being aware of moments when you’re not miserable. That’s a good start.

We find what we look for. Neuroscience calls this phenomenon the brain’s “confirmation bias”. Your brain tends to see what it believes to be true and misses whatever doesn’t confirm its hypothesis. If you don’t think you experience much true happiness because you’re holding an image that it should be a peak experience of ecstasy, you probably will keep confirming that belief.

However, if you see moments of “okayness”–moments where you’re not suffering–as moments worthy of appreciation, you open the channel to true well-being. And the more you notice and take them in, the stronger that flow of true well-being naturally becomes–not through force but through wise attention. As neuroscience expert Rick Hanson says: “The brain is like Teflon for positive experiences and Velcro for negative ones.”

When you let go of looking for ecstatic states, you can find joy in the most commonplace moments. Edith, a student in Germany, had somehow equated joy with intense positive experiences. But when she stopped looking for those and just opened up to a simple feeling of well-being she started to experience things very differently. She put it this way:

“I noticed how much joy there already is and how I had somehow looked for a kind of super-mundane, “spiritual” joy, more profound and lasting than our ordinary joy, that I would only reach if I practiced hard and in the right way. By having this concept, and by looking for this other kind of joy, I had missed out on a lot of “ordinary joy” moments. As I focused on them, appreciated them and felt them more fully, I was so happy and sometimes almost overwhelmed at all the joy and blessings in my life.”

I remember many years ago hearing a wise teacher give instructions on the Buddhist heart practice called “loving-kindness” or metta meditation. He said that sometimes the word “loving-kindness” can seem so lofty and noble that we imagine it’s beyond our reach. He suggested connecting with the simple feeling of “kindness” or “friendliness” towards oneself or others. That’s so much more accessible and it will start the gentle flow of good-heartedness we’re looking for.

In the Buddhist model of happiness, refined states of well-being are ultimately more sustainable and more satisfying. As wonderful as it is, rapture is considered a coarser level of happiness that, after a while, becomes jarring jangling to the system. Gladness, then happiness, followed by contentment are considered states that are much more developed and fulfilling. Ultimately, deep peace is the most satisfying state of all, and is said to be the precursor to true enlightenment.

So, if you’re trying to cultivate genuine happiness within yourself, you might consider letting go of attempting to experience a geyser gusher of intensity. Awakening joy comes naturally from truly appreciating the simple moments of well-being in our lives.
James Baraz is a co-founding teacher of Spirit Rock Meditation Center, co-author of Awakening Joy and has led his popular Awakening Joy online course since 2003. This year he will be offering a new 5-month Awakening Joy 2.0 curriculum starting in February focusing on loving-kindness and compassion with an outstanding line-up of guest speakers including IONS President and CEO Cassandra Vieten.